The Society for Laingian Studies
from the point of view of a man alienated from his source
creation arises from despair and ends in failure. But such
a man has not trodden the path to the end of time, the end of space, the end of darkness
and the end of light.
He does not know that where it all ends, there it all begins.
from 'Politics of Experience'
"D. Laing remains an important and controversial psychoanalyst and philosopher. His ideas are still provocative and powerful. They continue to irritate the psychiatric establishment. Nothing recommends a thinker better, to my mind, than the ability to irritate the professional and academic establishments years after his death. From my first encounter with Laing's writings in the eighties, as a college student when I heard about him in a philosophy class, I knew that this was a thinker whose ideas I would come to know well.
I have now read many of Laing's published works and I have read a great deal about him. I am certain that Laing's work has saved lives**. It has inspired much interpretative commentary and reaction. In my judgment, Laing's philosophical contributions, apart from his work as a therapist, are significant and place him in the front rank of phenomenological thinkers. In what follows, I wish to say something about Laing's understaning of evil, of the harm that we do to one another and to ourselves, and of the unavoidable task of coming to terms with the capacity within each of us both to cause and to suffer, as well as to overcome, such harm."
**(Hmmm. well, I know that he has offered some most excellent views in this Forum, but really, is it not taking things a bit too far to say that he has actually saved lives? I thought that it was only Al Rottenburger's posts that did that. )